Eric Voegelin, Book Note on Fritz Wagner’s Geschichtswissenschaft (March 1953)

Eric Voegelin’s book note assesses Fritz Wagner’s source collection on the principles of historical scholarship. Its central judgment is that Wagner’s selection, despite an insufficiently explicit definition of its subject and a pronounced German emphasis, provides an exceptionally useful account of critical history. The note moves from the institutional purpose of the Orbis Academicus series to the volume’s conceptual boundaries and arrangement, then concludes with an appraisal of its scholarly uses and supporting reference materials.

Voegelin places the publishing enterprise within the disruption of German academic life under National Socialism:

German science as an institution has suffered a serious break of continuity through the National Socialist interference with academic organization and personnel.

Under the general editorship of Wagner and Richard Brodführer, the series responds to this rupture by surveying the “history of problems” within individual disciplines. Such histories are intended both to establish the present state of inquiry and to recover the developments that produced it. For younger German scholars, this supplies orientation where institutional interruption has damaged disciplinary memory. Voegelin also stresses a wider usefulness: scholars generally need access to the development of the problems organizing their fields. The series’ historical undertaking thus has a practical academic purpose.

Wagner’s volume, the first in the series, assembles sources from antiquity to the present. Voegelin praises its introductory notes while observing that they do not adequately define a “science of history.” He therefore reconstructs the governing conception from the selections and incidental comments. Negatively, Wagner restricts the subject to critical history, excluding both uncritical annalistic writing and constructions of a philosophy of history. The positive direction is more specific:

Positively he sees the "critical" trend running toward a penetration of historical materials by the principles of a philosophical anthropology.

This formulation explains why the collection is more than a chronological survey of historical writing. Its organizing interest lies in the principles through which historical materials become objects of critical understanding, with philosophical anthropology furnishing the direction Voegelin identifies in Wagner’s choices. The note reports this orientation without developing a separate theory of anthropology or historical knowledge.

The distribution of the sources makes the delimitation visible. Approximately half the text covers classical and medieval authors, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and Romanticism; the remaining half extends from Savigny’s historical school to the First World War. Within the latter portion, Ranke and Dreysen represent Germany’s classical contribution, while Dilthey, York-Wartenburg, Troeltsch, and Max Weber anchor the treatment of historism. Positivist and Marxist sources, together with a section on the concept of culture, stand between these two principal groupings. Voegelin singles out passages from American historians Marsh, Parker, and McMaster as particularly interesting.

His final appraisal acknowledges limitations without turning them into objections to the enterprise as a whole. A comparison with Toynbee’s Greek Historical Thought would reveal the limits of Wagner’s Greek section; disputes over individual preferences would add little. The decisive assessment remains affirmative:

The work as it stands is an important source book on principles of critical history, without a rival.

For American readers, its strongest practical value is as a convenient, nearly complete manual of German contributions from Ranke onward. The extensive critical bibliography and biographical dictionary further strengthen that usefulness. Voegelin’s endorsement is consequently precise: Wagner supplies an outstanding documentary resource for the principles of critical history, especially their German development, while also serving the broader restoration of scholarly orientation that motivates the series.